Spurred by the rapid development of computer networks, commercial Internet service providers have grown rapidly in recent years and, in addition to World Wide Web (WWW) services, have begun to provide such network services as network searching, online gaming, network banking, e-mail, digital file transfer through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Bulletin Board System (BBS), and text-oriented communication through the Telnet protocol. Today, thanks to the widespread availability of such network services, people are used to acquiring all sorts of information through the Internet to meet the various needs in their daily lives or at work.
In light of the fact that computer networks have become indispensable tools for not a few, many public places provide access to wireless networks either on payment or free of charge. And from a consumer's perspective, “free wireless networking” has been a major factor in deciding whether or not to patronize a restaurant, coffee shop, hotel, or store. By providing free wireless networking, however, the owner of a place of business expects something in return. For instance, a shop providing free wireless network services may give preferential treatment (e.g., free food offering or a discount) to, and thereby encourage, those who “check into” the shop publicly via a social networking website such as Facebook, Twitter, or Plurk, with a view to the potential advertising effect.
Moreover, with the development of the concept of Big Data, more and more shops have learned to achieve success of advertisement by means of consumers' “network identities” on social networking websites. For example, a shop owner may know a consumer's interests and needs by the consumer's personal data on a social networking website and can therefore target the consumer for sales promotion. This is why many shops that provide free wireless networking require customers to complete a verification process (e.g., logging on to a Facebook account) before they can access free wireless networks. The verification process allows the shops to record the types of their customers so that sales strategies can be adjusted or advertisement, sent out whenever needed.
In order for a consumer to verify their network identify, a shop must create a walled garden in its networking equipment in advance, wherein the walled garden stores the address of a social networking website (e.g., Facebook). When a consumer's terminal device is connected to the networking equipment and requests access to network services, the networking equipment starts by allowing the terminal device to access only the social networking website whose address is stored in the walled garden. Then, the networking equipment requests the consumer to perform a verification process. The networking equipment will not make all its network functions available until a confirmation message indicating “verification completed” is received from the social networking website.
The foregoing verification process, however, has a flaw. If a consumer only needs to use the functions of that social networking website (e.g., browsing Facebook pages that are open to the public) but not the functions of other external networks (e.g., receiving or sending e-mails, or browsing a video website), he or she can do so without verification. The issue to be addressed by the present invention is to provide an easy-to-implement method that can prevent this flaw in verification effectively.